If Altman was regularly ignoring the safeguards his co-founder - who is the AI expert, BTW - then the board did the right thing. This belief that the only thing that matters is whether a company is increasing marketshare and value, regardless of ethics, is how we ended up with Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin. Would you work for a company that regularly ignores the warnings of its resident experts - the ones without whom the technology would not exist - just to make money?
it's all about how it went down - none of the investors, including the largest was updated on what was going on - Microsoft, found out minutes before the release.
I clearly was not in the room so look forward to hearing more about this but to have the largest investors surprised raises questions for me.
As far as ethics, yes, i care deeply about those and of course not, I'm not advocating Purdue Pharma like support. My point is if these were serious longstanding issues then there should have been no surprise from any one.
I agree that the way it went down was highly unusual and surprising. I don't know Sam Altman personally, but I've met him on several occasions. In fact, I met with him and Greg Brockman in 2015 at a small somewhat dingy office on Sansome Street in San Francisco when I was working at AWS. They were asking us to give them a couple of million bucks in credits that they could use to start training their models. Jassy took a pass on it, but that's a story for another day Anyway, given the tech scene in SF at that time, Sam struck me as far more thoughtful and humble than the typical startup executive I was used to working with.
That being said, I've worked in fast moving tech companies for long enough to know that its very easy to succumb to the temptation to play it fast and loose, to just ignore the safeguards and controls you put in place. Its too early to tell and I'm just speculating, but if there was evidence that Sam was instructing product teams to ignore these, or even evidence that customer data was being misused because product development was happening so fast, those are absolutely fireable offenses. Those types of things will burn trust with enterprise customers, and once you've lost that trust, its nearly impossible to get it back.
“Sam Altman's firing as OpenAI CEO was not the result of "malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices" but rather a "breakdown in communications between Sam Altman and the board," per an internal memo from chief operating officer Brad Lightcap seen by Axios”
‘Breakdown in communication’ to firing the CEO of arguably the world’s most important company abruptly still seems really extreme…
"Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal."
"Altman was courting SoftBank Group Corp. chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive."
Were the new startups fund raising the driver behind the "not consistently candid" comment?
"OpenAI board chafed at Altman’s efforts to raise funds off of OpenAI’s name .. concerns that the new businesses might not share the same governance model as OpenAI, the person said."
Very interesting. . firing him for a breakdown in communication seems very thin to me. On the other hand, I could see how his co-founder, who was basically responsible for all the major technological breakthroughs that power OpenAI's platform, might chafe at Altman using the OpenAI brand as a way to raise money for other ventures.
If Altman was regularly ignoring the safeguards his co-founder - who is the AI expert, BTW - then the board did the right thing. This belief that the only thing that matters is whether a company is increasing marketshare and value, regardless of ethics, is how we ended up with Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin. Would you work for a company that regularly ignores the warnings of its resident experts - the ones without whom the technology would not exist - just to make money?
I wouldn't.
it's all about how it went down - none of the investors, including the largest was updated on what was going on - Microsoft, found out minutes before the release.
I clearly was not in the room so look forward to hearing more about this but to have the largest investors surprised raises questions for me.
As far as ethics, yes, i care deeply about those and of course not, I'm not advocating Purdue Pharma like support. My point is if these were serious longstanding issues then there should have been no surprise from any one.
So let's see what comes out...
I agree that the way it went down was highly unusual and surprising. I don't know Sam Altman personally, but I've met him on several occasions. In fact, I met with him and Greg Brockman in 2015 at a small somewhat dingy office on Sansome Street in San Francisco when I was working at AWS. They were asking us to give them a couple of million bucks in credits that they could use to start training their models. Jassy took a pass on it, but that's a story for another day Anyway, given the tech scene in SF at that time, Sam struck me as far more thoughtful and humble than the typical startup executive I was used to working with.
That being said, I've worked in fast moving tech companies for long enough to know that its very easy to succumb to the temptation to play it fast and loose, to just ignore the safeguards and controls you put in place. Its too early to tell and I'm just speculating, but if there was evidence that Sam was instructing product teams to ignore these, or even evidence that customer data was being misused because product development was happening so fast, those are absolutely fireable offenses. Those types of things will burn trust with enterprise customers, and once you've lost that trust, its nearly impossible to get it back.
the plot thickens...hopefully not an ethical issue but more here
https://x.com/bentossell/status/1725951439053201704?s=20
“Sam Altman's firing as OpenAI CEO was not the result of "malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices" but rather a "breakdown in communications between Sam Altman and the board," per an internal memo from chief operating officer Brad Lightcap seen by Axios”
‘Breakdown in communication’ to firing the CEO of arguably the world’s most important company abruptly still seems really extreme…
and this from bloomberg...
https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1725933525562442072?s=20
"Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal."
"Altman was courting SoftBank Group Corp. chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive."
Were the new startups fund raising the driver behind the "not consistently candid" comment?
"OpenAI board chafed at Altman’s efforts to raise funds off of OpenAI’s name .. concerns that the new businesses might not share the same governance model as OpenAI, the person said."
Very interesting. . firing him for a breakdown in communication seems very thin to me. On the other hand, I could see how his co-founder, who was basically responsible for all the major technological breakthroughs that power OpenAI's platform, might chafe at Altman using the OpenAI brand as a way to raise money for other ventures.